Best Martin Scorsese movie

Was just reading the NY-er piece on Marvel, earlier. The Marvel Scorsese says it's "not cinema". There is a continuity: the dominant form of Hollywood filmmaking for its time, like the epic might have been in the 50s, as detailed in the Scorsese doc.

Except that Hollywood doesn't make the huge profits back then (when TV came along), it has been one of a number of entertainment options for a long time. Still, you can see why MS said "it wasn't cinema". No directors, stars don't really count (except Robert Downey Jr.), acting seems more of a degraded form. Even so I think MS could talk about the role of visual effects in the way the NY-er piece does. Both the tech and the brutal working conditions have bought the costs down.

*said what he did

someone should ask MS abt animation-as-cinema, as that seems pertinent (all of MCU is basically in the tradition of bedknobs and broomsticks)

Yes I've seen the parallel between MCU and 50's biblical epics mentioned before and it makes sense to me (partic in how both are so fucking tedious).

I don't know that "not cinema!" is ever a useful lens of critique, same as "not music!" or "not art!".

I'd say there's some more stars that kinda "count" beyond Downey Jr: Chris Pratt (for better or worse), Chadwick Boseman, ScarJo to some extent. The parade of blonde hunks called Chris hasn't got much star power but then it's not like classic Hollywood was above blank whitebread white man protagonists.

I'd be amazed if MS didn't love Miyazaki.

xp - yes the NY-er piece went through all of those actors though Downey Jr. He is the one that kept coming up through the phases of Marvel -- and the description of what Downey Jr. bought to those films sounded like he was having fun (which is often like acting, to me). The others don't register as much.

Having said that they weren't like "stars" of old. The piece had a quote from someone talking about how all their non-Marvel films bombed.

lol i do actually have a theory abt why e.g. chrises hemsworth and evans can both be effective and funny actors within the MCU ensembles, doing good close-up facework against greenscreen backdrops they can't see as they act, and then can't transfer this to films without greenscreen or their usual foils (it's not even a very elaborate or contrarian theory)

Can you please share your theory with the rest of the class?

not right now

Fair enough?

You'll have to suscribe to the patreon

i feel like "not cinema" was a gut reaction to a dull question and probably doesn't bear more analysis than that

probably yes, and also in a weird way an attempt at diplomacy - "this doesn't really have anything to do with what I do, don't ask me about it" as opposed to "this is a bad and inferior example of the medium I work in". obviously tho if his intention was to avoid outrage that didn't work out.

It was very brief and general a comment so we can say it wasn't thought through.

From this doc though we can say MS' take on cinema is very auteurist, it's maverick directors who go against the studio bosses. Or studio bosses that are mavericks. Marvel only appears to have the latter. All of it appears to be quite calculated to cut out the role of a director.

In the NY-er it talks about several comic book films which had a life before and after the MCU. So it talks about Branagh's Thor and then the later ones. I hate Branagh, but he would've stamped some Shakespearian bollocks to it (I haven't watched it so). It seems like a one-off.

heh!

"get the Shakespearian bollocks guy"

Eh the first Thor is less a Branagh film than the third and fourth are Waititi films. Gotg also pretty clearly James Gunn films. For better and (mostly) worse.

Edgar Wright did get kicked off Ant Man and I'd guess that's partially to do with having a distinct visual style and sensibility - not someone you'd be keen to champion as an auteur either I realise.

Lucretia Martel was in talks to do Black Widow but refused because they refused to let her have input into the fight scenes iirc.

in the context of watching them with the kid, i like the marvel movies well enough when they're hitting the right notes, but it's just a lot of mediocre content you've gotta get through. the third acts are almost always exhausting, FX-heavy ripoffs of earlier marvel films.

to compare blockbusters, i watched MI: Rogue Nation with the kid a couple weeks back and the filmmaking craft and storytelling were so much more accomplished, he was kinda wowed after all those superhero flicks and the non-Gilroy brothers Star Wars content we've been trudging through.

i would have thought Scorsese's tossed-off or otherwise not-cinema was a lot to do with what ended up on the screen as much as how it was made but perhaps the question that provoked it (cant recall it myself at this stage) had a very specific bent that would say otherwise

omar otm re marvel movies they are all fine at some stuff and truly awful at other stuff and as a whole its a waste of time and attn to have watched them at all by the time the credits are rolling

This piece by John Lahr is a version of MS' doc

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/john-lahr/toots-they-owned-you

I and my ‘basic material’, as scripts were called at the studio, were passed to his friend, the director Mark Rydell, who was so smooth Gucci wore his shoes. (‘I love what you do’ were his first words.)

lol this is the character Rydell plays in The Long Goodbye too.

Right

"A work of non-friction" is a clever turn of phrase.

Untouchables

It wasn't until I saw the original Cape Fear a year or two ago that I realized how bad Scorsese's remake is. Crude and sloppy.

I haven't watched it in a while, but last time I did, I felt like he was stylistically going for a Hitchcock homage but laid it on way too thick. In its defense, I think some of the new elements Scorsese brought to the material was promising, and the cast is terrific, but that potential doesn't come to fruition.

I remember the original Cape Fear being reactionary in a way that isn't shocking if you've seen enough anonymous b movies of the era but when I saw it I'd mostly seen stuff from the auteur A list and as a consequence it felt quite disgusting.

I used to despise Cape Fear, but watching it again in April set me straight. It's a compelling mess. The parts I was most afraid to re-visit (i.e. anything with Juliette Lewis) were the most compelling.

Cape Fear is among the Marty joints I haven’t gotten to yet.

Not sure if watching the 1962 original first would be better or worse for your experience. (I definitely saw the 1991 version first, though it was fine. Watched the 1962 version, then the 1991 version again a few months later, and realized I dislike it a great deal.)

I don’t know if I will see it, in part because it doesn’t seem like my jam. (This is also why I didn’t see Taxi Driver until very recently.)

It wasn't until I saw the original Cape Fear a year or two ago that I realized how bad Scorsese's remake is. Crude and sloppy.

Not sure whether I'd seen the original at that point or not, but Scorsese's was just standalone terrible either way.

I saw taxi driver when I was younger and thought it was great but every subsequent viewing just moves it higher up in my personal top ten. It's iconography and college dude movie rep don't help expectations but it's an unexpectedly beautiful film. I think Scorsese is maybe at his best when he doesn't give you exactly what you think he'll give you. As great as he often is at doing his "usual thing."

Yeah, it's been way too long since I saw Cape Fear (and I suspect it was an edited-for-television version) to know whether I think it's as bad as all that. Shutter Island is his better thriller no doubt

for my thanksbirthday i received the criterion 4K of Mean Streets. it's a film where so much of his thing is already there, especially the seemingly improvised street humor. that backroom conversation between DeNiro and Keitel is such an A+ scene in that respect.

there's a vv good interview w/Scorsese in the new issue of Esquire (which was delivered to us, addressed to a fictional-sounding name: someone who doesn't apparently exist) and he's aware he's entering his final stretch (i mean obv, he just turned 81) and is hoping to get several more films made.

Did you know that "mook" is acceptable in Scrabble? This is true. And, if you play it, also sets up exactly the response you want from your opponent.

https://scrabble.merriam.com/finder/mook

The Raging Bull thread is on I Love Film...Can someone identify the music here for me?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2xD-HYTPPI

Pietro Mascagni's Barcarolle from the opera Silvano.

Many thanks.

Is “mook” an ethnically offensive word, or does it just have that association because the guys in Mean Streets say it? I ask that because I occasionally use the word IRL.

According to that link to the Scrabble dictionary, it just means "a foolish or contemptible person," no ethnicity involved. Which is how I always took it from the film too.

Good to know. I will be less self conscious about calling people mooks going forward.

A mook is a mook is a mook. The word cuts across race, ethnicity, gender, everything. They're everywhere.

And they all worship the same god.

https://i.postimg.cc/0QQjhWKg/mook.jpg

Watched Who's That Knocking at My Door? for maybe only the second time in my life (the DVD I used was a still-sealed $3 copy I bought at least 10 years ago). Whatever I may have posted in the past working from memory, didn't think it was great at all--one incredible four-minute musical cue ("El Watusi"), some technical interest, a very good performance from Keitel (also Zina Bethune, who basically disappeared from movies afterwards), and not a lot else. Endless conversations that go around in circles--which anticipate the same in later films, but they're not at all funny here. I can understand why someone like Ebert would have made a fuss over it in 1969, and there are other directors where I prefer early rough work to polished later stuff--and honestly, I'd take it over Killers of the Flowers Moon. But not over Mean Streets, which is exponentially better.

We posted the first of these on May 18, 2020 (20th Century Women), the early days of the pandemic; we've got two more to go after this one, on three Scorsese films:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAuMg5zjgIo

Some confusion over whether the "Steppin' Out" in Mean Streets is John Mayall's or Cream's. I guess it is Cream (not on any of the studio albums)--I always thought it was from the first John Mayall album.

Cream did a long version of "Steppin' Out" on Live Cream II, an archival release from '72.

It was initially mistitled/credited as "Hideaway", which IIRC carried over to some prints of Mean Streets.

Both songs being instrumentals first recorded by Clapton during his time with Mayall.

That's it--I distinctly remember seeing "Hideaway" in the music credits more than once. Mystery solved, thanks.

The song in question (1:45):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2XMiK12VQ